I am not quite sure what the exact translation of this c. 1830 cartoon is but its essentially about the low cut dress being the cause of death by vanity? It seemed like an appropriate theme and time of year to ask for “La charité s’il-vous-plaît” (Charity Please! is what the French kids used to say instead of Trick or Treat in Quebec) so if anybody is fluent in French I would greatly appreciate a more precise translation.
Update: “The Pneumonia Dress from the House of Miss Vanity” seems the best updated translation.
My translation would be “Dress with illusion of breasts (or chest) from the workshop of Miss Vanity.” The context would add meaning to this since the wearer is a skeleton, who obviously would have no breasts, and perhaps that’s the point of the illustration – that such a low-cut dress would give an illusion of breasts to even a skeleton.
Thank-you Christian!
Google Translate helps: “Dress of pneumonia, from the workshop of Miss Vanity”. Makes sense to me. More precisely a dress of “inflammation of the chest” – which Google very helpfully translated directly to pneumonia. 🙂
Is Fluxion pneumonia? I couldn’t figure out what that word was…
I think “Fluxion” is the inflammation part. “De poitrine” is “the chest” so literally “inflammation of the chest” or “sickness of the chest”.
So perhaps the best contemporary translation would be: “Pneumonia Dress from the House of Miss Vanity”